The creative bods at Pixar are a sneaky, understandably secretive bunch loath to give out too many details when their films are still being cultured on the storyboards and in the early stages of being planted out on the render farm. So you can understand The Good Dinosaur’s director, Bob Peterson, being cagey about the film when talking to the LA Times. Still, he did drop a couple of nuggets about what we can likely expect.
"It's time to do a movie where you get to know the dinosaur, what it's really like to be a dinosaur and to be with a dinosaur," he tells the paper’s 24 Frames blog.
While most of the plot of the movie remains under wraps, we do know that it posits a world where the asteroid never struck Earth, and the dinosaurs are still walking around on a planet that also now contains humans. Peterson drew the inspiration from a childhood visit to the World’s Fair, which boasted dino animatronics. And, after all, what kid doesn’t want to live in a world where there are dinosaurs wandering around? You know, aside from the practical dangers.
With Team Pixar throwing itself into research at natural history and science museums and poring over fossils to get ideas for characters, Peterson has been out and about in Northern California, travelling with his laptop to write the script, as revealed by his Twitter feed. "So if there's a bunch of dinosaurs in a Whole Foods parking lot in this movie, you'll understand why," he says.
Co-director Pete Sohn also talked to the paper, revealing that "The title is deceptively simple. It has more meaning than it seems."
We’ll have to wait a while to know for sure what he means, as The Good Dinosaur isn’t set to stomp into cinemas until 2014. Pixar's latest, Brave, will arrive on in the UK August 17 and in the US on June 22, the lucky bar stewards.